


GEOGRAPHY OF THE ANDERFELS

by spicyshimmy



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: M/M, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-28
Updated: 2011-08-28
Packaged: 2017-10-23 03:34:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/245842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spicyshimmy/pseuds/spicyshimmy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Karl Thekla isn’t the handsomest man in the Circle. He isn’t the biggest either, or the bravest, or even the most interesting. </i> Written for syberfag @ tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	GEOGRAPHY OF THE ANDERFELS

Karl Thekla isn’t the handsomest man in the Circle. He isn’t the biggest either, or the bravest, or even the most interesting.

Anders confesses as much to him one warm summer afternoon in a secluded alcove of the library, while Karl reads paragraph upon paragraph of dull force mage theory. He won’t look up from his book, but the hand he braced against the table balls into a fist, which is how Anders knows he’s listening.

‘All this flattery is sure to make me blush,’ Karl mutters, tart, index finger keeping his place. ‘Are you this kind to all your companions?’

Anders reads the first sentence in his book upside down. _All mages manipulate energy, but Force Mages revel in it._ That makes the specialization sound interesting, but it isn’t—not really. Anders prefers to revel in simpler pleasures, like tricking the toe of his soft leather boot along the embroidered hem of Karl’s robes.

They’re heavy for summer, thick enough that Anders can feel their weight through the sole.

‘Only if they’re _very special_ ,’ Anders says. ‘Besides, I don’t have any companions. Just friends. More like one acquaintance—at least at present.’

He grins, letting the question drift between them, falling through the air like a stray goose-feather on laundry day.

Karl looks his way at last, and Anders stares hard into his face, scouring the lines in his brow, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, framing his mouth—anything that might betray Karl’s secret laughter.

Karl isn’t the handsomest man in the Circle, but sometimes, he does have the best sense of humor.

Anders foot twitches against his boot, and Karl crosses his legs.

‘Then you might prefer reading with him—whoever he may be,’ Karl says, and gets up to leave without finishing the passage on _Fist of the Maker_.

*

They’re both from the Anderfels, and while that might be a good opening line for anyone else, Anders remembers nothing important about his so-called homeland.

There was snow, and rocky mountains, and an embroidered pillow that he sleeps on every night, hand-stitched by his mother, one seam in need of darning and the stuffing worn thin through in the middle—but the rest is a blur, muddy now, thanks to Ferelden. The archive’s books contain a few basic facts, but studying for conversation’s never been Anders’s style.

Studying for _anything_ , really.

 _Give me spontaneity, or give me death,_ Anders thinks, then resolves to remember that one for later. It’s a good catchphrase, and hopefully no templars will be around to oblige him.

‘Did you know, our people were the _very first_ to fight the darkspawn?’ Anders asks, sliding onto a bench next to Karl at mess. He’s wielding a spoon at a bowl of mud-brown stew—knowing the tower cooks, it’s made from _actual_ mud—but his roll’s untouched, and Anders swipes it daintily off his plate. He doesn’t bother to swallow, with not talking while his mouth’s full. ‘Aside from the dwarves, I mean, but dwarves don’t count in the Circle.’

‘Are you trying to make conversation?’ Karl asks. ‘Or have you just decided to insult someone else today?’

‘Can’t it be both?’ Anders replies, with a winning smile.

He dusts the crumbs from his lap, fingers sliding against Karl’s thigh under the table.

*

‘I find it hard to believe you’re interested in the Anderfels,’ Karl says, arms locked neatly behind the small of his back.

It’s an ambush on top of the roof, Anders picking elfroot with the other healers, in the only garden they’re allowed to keep, under the hard Fereldan sun. But Karl isn’t a healer, which means he’s here for other reasons—a morning constitutional, a bit early still for an afternoon stroll.

There’s mud on Anders’s robes and dirt caked under his nails, but he can at least smooth back the loose wisps of his hair in an attempt to look presentable, juggling a skirt full of tubers.

 _That is a tuber in my lap,_ Anders thinks, _but I’m still happy to see you._

‘Oh, but I am,’ he says. Then, remembering Karl’s penchant for quoting long, tedious passages of geographical statistics, he continues, ‘Chiefly the, ah, _physiology_ of its people. Beyond myself. Its primary exports to the Fereldan Circle. That sort of thing.’

‘You can’t export snow,’ Karl tells him.

‘No _wonder_ you’re so cold,’ Anders replies.

*

Winter in the tower is no worse than winter anywhere else. A few of the younger acolytes find ways to warm up, but Anders, for the first time since his unwilling arrival, doesn’t join in. His fingers are stiff and cold, and in the privacy of his own room, beneath a tent made from his blankets, he lights tiny fireballs to warm his palms, knees pressed to his chest, tricking the flames down by his toes.

All the rest of the time, he wears woolly socks, itchy and rough, and when he pulls them on in the morning he imagines they feel like Karl Thekla’s beard, if the man ever let him get so close.

*

‘Ah, youth,’ Anders says, watching a few of the junior enchanters flirt between the stacks, tossing notes over an arcane bestiary. Karl’s researching the Imperium, or Kirkwall, or something, and Anders has no idea what the two have to do with one another, or why anyone would ever read _A History of the City of Chains._

‘Must be hard for you to remember that far back,’ Anders adds, leaning against the shelf. He blows dust into Karl’s ear, and the two of them sneeze, then look away from each other, like when a cat knows it’s been caught licking someplace indecent, or missing an easy jump.

‘I don’t know about that, Anders,’ Karl says, while the fine, happy wrinkles at the corners of his eyes smile. ‘After all—you’re getting on in years, yourself.’

*

They have lunch together after that, an unspoken but standing agreement; Anders hates stew and Karl skips his bread, and when Anders bumps his foot against Karl’s beneath the table he doesn’t pull back or fold his arms or clear his throat like a warning rather than a promise. He doesn’t have a tell, either, though sometimes he looks straight across the way, and Anders doesn’t know where to put it, how to keep all the attention that he wants.

‘You have a crumb,’ Karl says, and reaches out to touch it, ‘right there,’ while his thumb is warm and blunt at the corner of Anders’s mouth.

*

‘Fireball?’ Anders asks, in the after-hours; he knows he’ll find Karl in the stacks, but he isn’t reading, chafing his big hands together above the vellum pages. He snaps his fingers and lights the spark and holds it out, and Karl cups his palms around the flame, no one touching anyone else.

Anders keeps his hands low enough that he doesn’t singe the ends of Karl’s beard, the flickering light settling into the wrinkles on his face. This close, Anders can imagine the windswept crags of his birthplace, Karl’s features wrought in stone, shaped by the stiff climate of the Anderfels.

‘Watch where you hold that thing,’ Karl counsels, twin flames reflected in his eyes. He steps closer, and Anders wonders if he might not be the sort of man who defies caution after all.

Karl isn’t burning, Anders thinks. His lips are thin amidst his graying beard, curved up at the corners in a smile. And the shadows are only a trick of the light.

*

There’s no privacy for apprentices in the dormitories, and none for mages, either. The closest a lucky man can get is in one of the abandoned stacks, crammed full with dusty old treatises on Orlesian history—which no self-respecting Fereldan would be caught dead reading.

Karl’s robes are standard issue, thick and soft and rough-spun, and when Anders sinks to his knees on the stone floor and tugs them over his head, Karl stifles a noise against the ball of his fist.

‘I’m not going to bite it off,’ Anders promises.

It’s a shame Karl can’t see him grin, a flick of white teeth in the dark between his thighs.

Anders pulls Karl’s smalls aside with his teeth—he read it in a book once, and it sent prickles of heat lancing through every inch of bare skin. Next time he’ll use his hands, but the mouthful of cotton is well worth it when Karl’s muscles jump at the sudden press of Anders’s cold nose against the soft skin below the line of his hip.

‘ _Anders,_ ’ Karl says. He isn’t howling like the winds between Weisshaupt and Hossberg just yet, but Anders won’t let that discourage him.

They’re only just getting started.

He licks his lips, and takes the head of Karl’s cock into his eager mouth. It’s larger than the last person Anders did this for, which he suspected all along.

*

Anders can’t sit still on the bench at breakfast, and it’s not always a side-effect of his personality.

There’s a red mark like a spider-bite on the left side of his throat, hidden beneath the high collar of his favorite robes—the blue with gold threading, not nearly as ugly as the rest.

‘ _You’re_ looking cheerful this morning,’ Jowan says, bringing his empty plate up for seconds. Jowan has yet to pass his Harrowing, and if the hard cant to his mouth means anything, he’ll be up for another try in less than a week. Dark hairs prickle along his sallow cheeks, and Anders rubs his own bare jaw in sympathy, the joint clicking, tongue against the backs of his teeth. ‘Been brushing up on your…fireballs again? I didn’t see you at lights-out, Anders.’

‘I’ve been studying northern history, actually.’ Anders shreds the white fat from his bacon, but he isn’t watching his plate. ‘There’s a volume on the Anderfels I just couldn’t put down. You know how those old volumes just _suck_ you in.’

Jowan clears his throat, fingers shifting nervously along the line of his tray. ‘Why is it that whenever I talk to you, I feel like I’ve intercepted a coded message meant for someone else?’ he asks, then nods, while Anders feels fresh warmth at his back, a shadow passing over his bloody Fereldan meat.

‘Thank the Maker,’ Karl says, rough; he rests his hand against Anders’s shoulder, thumb brushing the hidden mark at his throat. Anders remembers when Jowan spilled a glass of hot milk in his lap, and wriggles down against the bench. ‘And here _I_ thought it was just me.’

 **END**


End file.
